Mossy landing for Frank.

Before he sold his company to the big blue supergiant in 2004, Aubrey Chernick, the founder and former CEO of Candle Software, is reported to have repeatedly told friends he would sell his company to anyone except IBM.

Frank Moss, the US software entrepreneur, seems to have no such concerns - indeed, he seems to be a master of making companies attractive to IBM.

Just before Christmas 2005, Bowstreet, the enterprise web services software company that Moss co-founded at the end of the 1990s, was sold to IBM for an undisclosed sum. The deal means that IBM can now add a high speed web-services portal building system to its growing armoury of application-builder tools.

Moss founded Bowstreet using venture capital money - some $140 million - and, reportedly, a lot of his own cash too. He was well placed to do this, having sold Tivoli to IBM, the systems management software company of which he was CEO, for a fat $743 million in 1996. At the time, Tivoli had sales of just $50 million.

Before Tivoli, Moss was a senior executive at Lotus Development, which was sold for a healthy $3.5 billion in 1991 to... IBM.

This startling track record shows Moss to be a software visionary, who respectively saw and exploited growing demand and interest in collaboration software, distributed systems management and web services. But there is another view: that in each case, the company sold was being outmanoeuvred by larger and more aggressive competitors - notably Microsoft (with Exchange) and Computer Associates (with Unicenter).

Even so, the purchase of Bowstreet, presumably for less than was invested in the company, gives IBM a strong position in what is perhaps the biggest enterprise software challenge at present - building up new, composite applications from a myriad of smaller, plug-in services.